New Findings Prove the Effectiveness of Sales Enablement
I’m an enabler.
No, not the kind you’re thinking—a different kind of enabler.
I’m referring, of course, to one of my favorite topics: sales enablement. By sales enablement, I mean a practice that equips sellers with content, training, and tools aligned to the buying process. Its purpose is better seller readiness, message consistency, and execution so every conversation moves deals forward more predictably. I’m an enabler in that anyone who knows me knows that I talk about this topic a lot because I have seen the difference it can make. I’ve also written before about how important this is for B2B marketers, especially in an industry like building, where there’s no shortage of products and innovations that sales people need to be experts on at any given moment. (Refer to the end of this blog post for some other posts I’ve written about this topic.) And although I might talk and blog about it a lot, it’s for good reason—and some newly-released numbers prove just that.
A recent article from marketingland.com entitled “Don’t Waste Marketing Leads: Achieve Revenue Goals With Sales Enablement” discusses some new findings from a recent study that no B2B marketer should ignore. Most notably, that a recent survey of more than 400 B2B sales and marketing professionals found that 57% of respondents with a sales enablement function ranked their sales efforts as either “effective” or “very effective.” That’s a massive jump in effectiveness, and it’s all thanks to B2B marketers working with their sales teams to create the content and tools they need to be successful with today’s increasingly educated and empowered buyers. In building products, reps win when spec sheets, installation guides, code compliance summaries, and configurators are easy to find. Add demo and how-to videos, ROI calculators, competitive comparison matrices, and concise case studies mapped to project stages.
That’s right—creating effective sales enablement tools requires a cohesive effort between sales and marketing, which is another topic that my business partner recently wrote about for the October 2015 edition of Dealer Digest, a digital publication from Huttig Building Products. (Read that article here.) It can be challenging, but results like these prove that the time, money, and effort is more than worth it. ROI like that is hard to ignore.
Track content usage and buyer engagement, time to first meeting, sales cycle length, and win rate. Also watch average deal size and new seller ramp time, then share dashboards with sales leadership so impact stays visible.
After all, if you could increase the perception of your marketing and sales effectiveness by more than 20%, wouldn’t you do everything you could to make that happen?
Well, now the numbers show that you can.
Here is a roundup of some of our more recent posts about sales enablement, an important topic that continues to impact the B2B world—particularly in building products:
- Sales Enablement: You’re Up and Then You’re Down
- Is Your Sales Promotion Failing? Or Are You Just Failing Your Sales Team?
- 10 Steps to Enable Your Building Products Event Experience (Part 1)
- 10 Steps to Enable Your Building Products Event Experience (Part 2)
